AIarXiv

Ranked by formulaVerdict: Notable

Route Anything: A Study of Model and Policy Routing for General-Purpose AI Systems

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) requires a method that can understand, generate, reason, and act across diverse domains and modalities.

By Zhou, Ma, Wang +4

Score██████░░░░6.3

Key numbers

  • 8.82x on average compared with
  • 24% less policy time

Caveats

  • Preprint; not yet peer reviewed.

VerdictWorth a reader's time today.

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Abstract

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) requires a method that can understand, generate, reason, and act across diverse domains and modalities. Rather than relying on a single model to master every capability, a promising path toward AGI now is to orchestrate a heterogeneous ecosystem of specialized models, tools, and policies (candidates) into a unified AI system. At the heart of this vision lies a fundamental question: how can an AI system dynamically select and coordinate the most capable candidate for each task while balancing performance and computational cost? In this work, we present Route Anything, a unified framework for studying model and policy routing across general-purpose AI systems. We develop a unified theoretical foundation that characterizes optimal routing under quality--cost trade-offs and establishes how the information available to a router determines its attainable performance. To systematically investigate routing across diverse capabilities, we first construct an omni-modal trajectory matrix spanning 25 benchmarks across language understanding, image, video, and speech generation, coding and workplace agents, and robotic manipulation, comprising 374,401 scored runs from 452 candidate configurations. Building on this framework, we train and test different routers to investigate the potential of omni-modal model routing, the capabilities of learned routers, and the conditions under which routing improves efficiency. Our results reveal substantial opportunities for capability orchestration: per-input oracle routing outperforms the best fixed candidate by 5.4 points, and learned routers outperform it by 0.3 points across 16 benchmarks, by 2.1 points on video generation, and by 1.1 points on robot manipulation while using 24% less policy time. More importantly, routing raises efficiency by 8.82x on average compared with the reference model.

Pengfei Zhou, Yixing Ma, Hexin Wang, Weidong Tang, Zhenglin Wan, Wangbo Zhao, Yang You

The editor's rubric

Heuristic review

Leverage4 / 5
A general-purpose tool used across several fields (Adam, ResNet, LoRA, next-generation sequencing).
24% of this desk’s rubric
Magnitude3 / 5
Large gain: roughly 2x, or a clear new state of the art on a hard, unsaturated problem.
18% of this desk’s rubric
Evidence3 / 5
Solid: multiple benchmarks or cohorts, ablations, fair baselines, released code or data.
14% of this desk’s rubric
Novelty3 / 5
A genuinely new approach to an open problem.
16% of this desk’s rubric
Trajectory3 / 5
A clear path to scale.
18% of this desk’s rubric
Stakes2 / 5
Benefits a professional community (practitioners, clinicians, engineers).
10% of this desk’s rubric

Editor’s rationale

Heuristic triage from title and abstract text only, not a reading of the paper. Cues found: method (we propose, new method); breadth (general-purpose, many tasks); gains (x-fold, outperforms); novelty (alternative to status quo); verification (multiple benchmarks); scale (efficient); stakes (general AI).

How the score was computed

rank-2026-10-18

Score██████░░░░6.3

Score = 10 × (65% × adjusted merit / 10 + 25% × attention + 10% × freshness)

Desks place stronger verdicts first, then use this score to order work within the same verdict.

Merit
6.3 / 10
Weighted rubric, evidence-gated.
Adjusted merit
5.1 / 10
Shrunk toward the desk prior by editor confidence (50%).
Attention
87%
Citations, upvotes, points, mentions.
Freshness
79%
Half-life decay since publication.
  • Hugging Face upvotes87 (reference 25, via hf-daily, Nov 4, 2026, 13:49 UTC)
  • GitHub stars2 (reference 250, via hf-daily, Nov 4, 2026, 13:49 UTC)

The record

  • Reviewed by heuristic-v10 on Nov 4, 2026, 13:49 UTC. Paper type: method.
  • Categories: cs.CV
  • TOP, No.3 in the Front page edition of November 4, 2026.
  • LEAD, No.1 in the Artificial Intelligence edition of November 4, 2026.